


I've Got Nothing But My Aching Soul

by thecivilunrest



Category: The White Queen (TV)
Genre: Death, F/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-18
Updated: 2013-09-18
Packaged: 2017-12-26 22:58:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/971284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecivilunrest/pseuds/thecivilunrest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The queen is dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I've Got Nothing But My Aching Soul

**Author's Note:**

> This was an interesting fic to write, and hopefully it's interesting to read. I just want to say, please don't be too hard on Elizabeth, she is a manipulated teenage girl. I've seen people get nasty and I hope that you'll all go easy on Lizzie here. (:

The queen is dying. 

Court has suspected this since the physicians announced that Richard and Anne could no longer share a bed, but there is no hiding it now. Most days Anne cannot leave her bed, and on the few days that she does she can only walk to the chair beside the window unaided, and sometimes not even that by herself. 

Queen Anne coughs blood into her handkerchief and struggles to breathe, but still she lives on. 

Elizabeth has stayed with the queen since she was confined to bed. It is one of the few ways that Elizabeth can do penance for wanting Anne’s husband even while she is still alive. Richard will not be with her while his wife is alive, he has told her that.

He kissed her once, a kiss that had lit a fire in Elizabeth’s blood, but he pulled away and has done nothing of the sort since. 

He still flirted with her, gave her smiles that are meant for her and her alone. So many see Richard as cold and distant, but Elizabeth sees him as a man of passion. 

He has stopped with that now that Anne is truly dying, and she thinks it is because of guilt. She feels the same way and so she tries to stay away from him, stays by the side of his ailing wife, and waits for the days when she will take the queen’s place in her husband’s bed as well as the place that she now has in his heart.

.

Anne tosses and turns in her sleep, unable to find comfort even when she is asleep. Elizabeth watches from a chair that she had dragged from the corner of the room to sit next to the bed so that she could read to the queen. Anne had asked for the story of Sarah and Abraham and Elizabeth had obliged, reading about a barren woman who had a child, and finds this ironic as well as cruel. 

There is no way that the queen will have a child now, even if she did recover, which will never happen. Once someone has contracted the consumption there is no turning back from the grave. 

Elizabeth cannot imagine this, cannot imagine have the knowledge of ones death hovering over life, and yet the queen never breaks. Anne faces every day with as much dignity as she can muster, which is not much anymore. The times that she seems weakest are when she is asleep. 

“Richard,” the queen calls out for a husband who isn’t there. Anne mumbles something else, but does not wake, instead turning on her side, her face away from Elizabeth. 

Cecily comes in and sees the bible in Elizabeth’s hands. “Are you looking for a passage that will absolve you of guilt?” her sister asks, smirking slightly. 

“No.” Elizabeth scowls. They get along so well normally, but on this one issue Cecily will not relent, will not let things lie. She will be happy enough, however, when the fact that she is the queen’s sister will make a good marriage a certainty. 

“You torment her by constantly prolonging your presence, you know.” Cecily looks over Anne and sighs. 

“Queen Anne has never said anything of the sort, and if I caused her any suffering she would send me out. You know this. It is not as if she loves us.” 

“Oh, Lizzie. You are blind.” Cecily shakes her head, and Elizabeth knows that it will be impossible to make her sister explain herself. “Let me sit with the queen,” she says. 

Elizabeth rises, gracing Anne one last glance. The queen is so weak and frail now, it is almost like she is not even here at all.

.

Richard visits as often as he is able, which is less and less the more time goes on. He never says much of anything, other than asking the physicians after Anne’s health and the maids about how her days go. 

Somehow, he manages to come when the queen sleeps. Granted this is not a hard thing to do, now that Anne sleeps more than she is awake, but there is something deliberate about his timing.

“Why do you never come when the queen is awake?” Elizabeth asks. “She asks for you in her sleep, sometimes.” 

“She does?” For a moment it was as if all of the darkness on Richard’s face that he had been wearing since Anne was confined to bed had lifted. Without seeming to think he steps closer to Elizabeth, the closest that he had been in a month, and Elizabeth took a step to match him. 

“Of course, you are her husband, why wouldn’t she?” 

Richard looks as though he wants to say something, but before he can Anne coughs from behind them. Her coughs are always large, shuddery things, but this is one of the loudest that Elizabeth has heard from her. The blood on the bed linens is visible from where they are standing all the way across the room. 

Three maids rush in and Anne straightens and when she does she is a pitiful and weak thing, wearing her regality like a worn cloak that no longer fits. “The king should not be in here,” she says, her voice thin and whispery. “Mistress Elizabeth, you should take him to the door so he does not contract my illness, as the physicians ordered.” 

“Of course,” Elizabeth murmurers, curtseying to Anne before straightening herself. 

“No, it is fine, I can walk myself,” Richard tells Elizabeth distractedly. He is not even looking at her, instead gazing at his wife who is gazing back. An unreadable look passes between them--a look that seems to count every hour of their twelve years as husband and wife--before Richard breaks it and nods. 

He leaves the room without once looking back at Elizabeth and she does not know what to make of that. 

.

Everyone knows that Henry Tudor is coming, that there will be an invasion, and that Elizabeth is betrothed to him. She can barely stand to think of Henry Tudor--this man that she does not know, this man who has not been in England since he was a boy--so she does not. Instead she thinks of Richard, who is constantly preparing for the invasion. 

The only time he is not mustering troops or writing letters or gathering funds for the treasury and armor he is sleeping or with Anne. 

Any day now Anne will pass, and the fact that Elizabeth is waiting for such a day is why she continues to stay with Anne even when the other ladies leave. She stays even when Anne is asleep, helps her through the worst of her coughing fits. 

Perhaps this is why, when she asks for audience with the king, he stands and demands, “Is it the queen?” 

“No.”

“Then why are you here?” Richard asks, sitting back down. There are books and parchment sprawled in front of him, and he looks the oldest that she has ever seen him. Every year that he has lived, and more, shows on his face. 

“I just wanted to see you. We have not been alone in so long...”

“That is because it is not proper and you are betrothed to the man that is coming for my crown.”

“And that is not my fault! I never asked...”

“Lizzie,” Richard finally sighs, standing up again. “You should go back to the queen. She will need you more than I and soon...soon she will not be here to serve anymore.” 

_And so he admits it,_ Elizabeth thinks. He has never said the words before, never acknowledged what will come for them after his wife’s death. Though he is not saying anything now, it is only a matter of time.

Richard holds her shoulders as he walks them both to the door, before he lets go of her. “Come to me at once if anything happens.” 

“Of course, Your Majesty,” she says. She is not even halfway through the her curtsey before the door closes in her face. 

.

All of the maids are standing outside of the queen’s chambers when Elizabeth and Cecily make their way there in the morning. “What is it?” Elizabeth asks, her heart pounding with excitement or dread she is not sure. 

Despite wanting Richard, Elizabeth has never wished Anne ill. Anne was never overly kind, but never was she unkind. She allowed Elizabeth to have dresses of the same fabric, allowed she and Cecily some of the best parts of the tapestry though she did not have to. Her aunt was as kind as could be expected, Elizabeth thinks, and she will be missed. 

“The king is talking to the queen, ordered everyone out,” the head maid says, drawing herself up to her full height, indignant. “He knows that he is not to go in there, both the physicians and the queen have said so, and yet this morning he demanded it.” 

“I will go in there and dissuade him. He will listen to me, I am his niece,” she says, going before anyone could stop her. 

The king and queen are talking, and Elizabeth can barely hear what they are saying. 

“...and I will be gone soon and then you will be happy,” Anne is telling Richard. 

“No, you are wrong,” he contradicts her. 

“Richard, stop pretending, and stop coming to me. There is no point anymore, everyone knows what your intentions are.” 

“I will not stop coming,” he swears. “You are not the only one hurt by your death, by our son’s death. I do not know what I will do without you. How can you deny me this? I just want to be here with you until you are gone.” 

“You will not even spare a thought for my last wish, which is to never see you again, especially not with _her_ ,” Anne tells him. There is not even malice to spare for him in her voice anymore; she says this matter-of-factly. 

Richard rises just as Elizabeth steps through the door, unable to hear anymore. She cannot stand to hear anyone talk against Richard in this way, especially not the woman who has vowed to love him through everything. 

“Your Majestys,” she says, but Richard just nods to her before walking out the door. There is no expression on his face, only careful blankness, and Elizabeth wonders when he became so unreadable to her. Or if she could ever read him at all. 

.

Elizabeth has never seen anything like the sun being darkened in the sky when Anne dies. She barely notices Richard walk into the room as she stares transfixed at the sky. For a moment there is darkness and then all is light again, but by then it does not matter, and Anne is drawing in her last breaths. 

“My sister is here,” Anne says. “And my son.” 

And then she says nothing more, does not breathe any longer, and is so still that she can only be dead. 

“Queen Anne?” Elizabeth asks, rushing to her side. That is when the truth finally sinks in--Queen Anne is dead. 

“It is no use,” Richard says, his voice strange. Elizabeth has never heard it sound like that before--a mix between guilt and grief and sorrow. She has never heard _anyone_ sound like that before, not even her mother when Father died. She thinks she can possibly see tears, but that cannot be--he cannot be crying for Anne, a woman that he no longer loved, a woman who obviously hated him. “She is no longer with us. Anne has gone to heaven, with her sister and our son, where she belongs.” 

He walks out the door before Elizabeth can respond. Elizabeth spares Anne one last look before walking to inform the maids, squaring her shoulders as she does. If there is one thing Elizabeth has inherited from her mother, it is the ability to push back her emotions so that the work can be done.


End file.
